Titanic: First Accounts

"Maltin’s book came out around the 100th anniversary, 13 or 14 years ago, and, as the title suggests, it’s an excellent collection of early attempts to report on and understand the disaster. It starts with two of the first books written by survivors. One is an excerpt from Lawrence Beasley’s The Loss of the Titanic and the other is a republication in full of a book called The Truth About the Titanic by a first class survivor, Archibald Gracie. Then it goes into some excerpts from the British and American inquiries into the disaster from 1912, newspaper reports, and other survivors’ recollections. It’s a really well put together collection, and gives you a sense of what people were saying about the disaster at the time. One of its limitations, oddly enough, is that it tends to emphasize reports that were more balanced and accurate. To me, as a cultural historian, it’s often the apocryphal stories told about the disaster, the more outrageous stories, that hold interest for what they might reveal about how people reflected on it and understood it at the time. Maltin’s collection consists largely of sober accounts—with a few exceptions—and he is up front in saying that he chose the first accounts that stand the test of time. To me, the best of these, and the best extended survivor’s account, is Lawrence Beasley’s The Loss of the Titanic . Beasley was a second class passenger. He was an English school teacher. What’s remarkable about it is how calm a reflection it is—so soon after what he endured in the disaster. A lot of initial reporting and survivor accounts are understandably highly emotional, overblown, and laden with purple prose. Beasley’s is a measured account that tells stories about heroism and about some less admirable behaviour. By and large, it is just a straightforward retelling of what he saw. He was a talented writer, so his description, for example, of what the sky looked like, that he’d never seen stars like that as he was watching the ship go down from a lifeboat, is really beautiful. There are a number of similar passages."